How's YOUR 401(k) doing?

For some reason, I'm on a rant about the economy. I remember one of the presidential debates in 2000 when Bush strongly advocated for privatizing social security, because he felt that private investors could get a better return on that investment. "I just think you can do better than two percent," I think he said -- I'm trying to track the exact quote down, if anyone can help. I've seen that argument made in NBER briefs, (beware -- this is a link to a pretty dry and boring pdf file) so it's not that rare an idea.

This administration loves to take arbitrary dates as starting points to denote economic progress. You know, like only counting the last 13 months of his administration when calculating job growth. But he's been in office nearly four years, and it's important to see the whole picture.

Just for kicks, I decided to see where the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed on January 22, 2000 -- the first day the market was open and this president was in office. DJIA closed at 10, 578.24 according to Yahoo finance. Today, after a small gain, it closed at 9,956.32.

The first day the tech-heavy NASDAQ was open for business during the Bush Administration, it closed at 2,757.91 and today it closed at 1,936.52 -- a fairly precipitous drop, I'd say. I'm sorry, no excuses -- you've had nearly four years to catch up after the "internet bubble" popped -- remember NASDAQ was up over 5,000 for a time and the bubble had long burst. Don't use 9-11 as an excuse, either -- within weeks the market had recovered most of the sudden losses, but then gradually lost ground.

Funny, after all the job cuts the companies of the DJIA and NASDAQ have made in the name of shoring up their stock prices, you'd think they could have done better than two percent gains as well. And you'd think that this president's economic policies, with all the tax cuts and cost-shifting on to workers, we'd do better than two percent. It 's a fact -- the DJIA and NASDAQ have lost value during this president's tenure, at least so far.

What was that? The economy is on the move? We're strong and growing stronger? Then why are so many people wondering what happened to their retirement?